JULIAN HUXLEY 
impossible to logic or discursive exposition; about religion as a 
psychosocial organ relating man in some significant way with 
the powers and forces that move him from within and batter 
on him from without, an agency for expressing, affirming, and 
struggling with his destiny in mingled awe and adoration. But 
I have neither the competence or the space. 
Let me summarize my theme. First, we biologists have to 
think of the future of man in the unfamiliar terms of psycho- 
social or cultural evolution. 
Looking back, we see that evolving man has lurched from 
one crisis to another. Great empires have collapsed, whole civi- 
lizations have been violently destroyed; thought has been 
muzzled, common people cruelly exploited, habitats ruined. 
One dominant phase of psychosocial evolution after another 
has reached a limit and has had to crumble and be remodelled 
or replaced if human advance was to continue. Yet in the long 
term there has been advance, and new advance has always 
sprung from new ideas, new knowledge and its applications. 
The present phase of the process is rapidly becoming self- 
limiting and self-defeating. If we fail to control our economic 
system, we over-exploit our resources. If we fail to prevent 
atomic war, we destroy civilization. If we fail to control our 
population, we destroy our habitat and our culture. However, 
our increasing knowledge is indicating how we might remodel 
our psychosocial organization and escape from the apparent 
impasse. 
The new and central factor in the present situation is that 
the evolutionary process, in the person of mankind, has for the 
first time become conscious of itself. We are realizing that we 
need a global evolutionary policy, to which we shall have to 
adjust our economic and social and national policies. 
To succeed in this we need to reorganize our science—to 
switch the various branches of science out of their separate 
channels, and bring them together in a co-operative effort. In 
particular, we must switch more and more of our scientific 
efforts from the exploration of outer space to that of inner 
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